For all Megan’s outward resilience, the way she’d clearly moved past losing her husband so young, how capably she’d recovered from her home going up in flames, Gabe could suddenly see her vulnerability.
Along with the fears she was trying so hard to hide.
As if she suddenly realized she was letting him look too deep, she said, “Well, thanks for fixing the window. And for the ride.”
He got the hint. It was time to go.
She was right. He needed to leave before he kissed her again.
She moved to the front door just ahead of him. Opening it, she stood there as he walked out, so close. Too close.
He should have just kept going down the hall and out to his car without looking back or saying anything more, but in the same way that being in her apartment, putting Summer to bed, and staying for coffee had felt so right, leaving felt just as wrong.
“Tell Summer I had a good time playing flashlight tag with her.”
He was standing close enough to smell her perfume, something soft and floral that made him want to bury his nose in the curve of her neck until he figured out exactly what kind of flower it was.
“Okay.”
The one word was slightly breathless and from the way her eyes were focused on his mouth, he knew she was just as close to that edge of wanting as he was.
Just one kiss. That’s all he wanted.
Needed.
Gabe had almost convinced himself it wouldn’t hurt anything, that he could stop at one more, when she abruptly lifted her gaze and took a step back on a sharply indrawn breath.
“Just friends.” She shook her head. “I like you a lot, Gabe, and that kiss in the kitchen...” Another shake of her head. “Well, we’ve got to forget that kiss. Because we’ve both agreed that’s how things need to stay. Even if it’s not easy, we’ve got to keep things totally platonic.”
When she was done laying out the reminders, she put her fingers over her mouth as if to keep herself from jumping across the threshold between them and kissing him. The problem was, all the good sense in the world couldn’t negate the magnetic pull between them.
Compelled to be as honest as they’d been in her kitchen after they’d given in to desire for way too short a time, he said, “I want you. And if you were anyone else, I wouldn’t be leaving right now.” Her eyes went wide at the shock of his flat-out admission. “But I already know and like you and Summer well enough to know we can’t just sleep together.”
“No,” she said quickly, even more breathlessly, “we can’t.”
Wanting her more with every word they spoke about the hot sex they weren’t going to have, he said, “I’d better go now.”
“Yes,” she whispered, “you should go.”
But then, instead of leaving, he was reaching out and pulling her against him, his hands on the swell of her hips. “One last kiss.”
“God, yes,” she gasped out. “One more.”
And then her mouth met his and he was backing her up against the open door, pressing himself into the soft heat of her body, taking, giving, falling deeper under the spell that Megan had woven around him from the very first second he’d seen her.
Her taste was addictive, so sweet he couldn’t stop himself from going deeper, from moving from her lower lip to her upper, from pulling her so close that he could feel her ni**les pressing into his chest even through their layers of clothes. He moved between her thighs and she opened them for him as he pressed her harder into the wall, her hips moving against his groin, making him harder than he could ever remember being in his life.
Here. He could take her right here. Pull up her skirt, unzip his pants, and be in her in seconds, her legs wrapped around his waist.
Somehow, a noise from down the hall broke through the fog of lust clouding his brain. He knew better than to put on a public sex show with Megan when her daughter was only a couple of rooms away.
In sync, they moved apart, both of them breathing hard.
“That was the last one,” she said in a shaky voice. “The very last kiss we can have.”
Somehow, he managed to turn away, to get his feet to move. But with every step that he took away from her, Gabe had a feeling that not kissing Megan again just might prove to be the most difficult thing he’d ever done.
* * *
Megan closed her front door and leaned against it, closing her eyes as she fought to deal with what had just happened. She brought her fingers back up to her lips. They were tingling, burning up from his kiss.
She couldn’t remember ever wanting anyone the way she wanted him. She’d had a couple of lovers since David had passed away five years ago, but none of them had imprinted themselves on her body like this. In fact, she suddenly realized the faces of her past lovers were cloudy in her memory.
After David, it wasn’t like she’d sat down one day and made the decision to stay away from men with dangerous, deadly jobs. She hadn’t been thinking about other men at all, actually. She’d been trying to raise her daughter on one income with only so many hours in the day while going back to school to get her degree in accounting.
It had been more of a gradual realization as she’d surfaced from her grief that she couldn’t go through all that again. Yes, she understood that a businessman could get hit by a car and die. But she was a numbers girl and it didn’t take a statistician to calculate that the odds of an early death were a heck of a lot lower for a man who sat behind a desk nine to five than they were for a fighter pilot.
Or a firefighter.
Still, she couldn’t help but remember the way he’d carried Summer out of his mother’s basement and then into their apartment a little while earlier. It had been utterly different from the way he’d carried her daughter out of the burning building. He’d been one hundred percent firefighter then. Tonight, he’d looked more like a father taking care of his sleeping daughter.
Her hands shook slightly as she locked the front door and turned off the lights in the kitchen and living room before heading to the bathroom to get ready for bed. She knew better than to make the mistake of thinking of Gabe as anything but an off-limits firefighter. They shouldn’t have shared those two kisses. But, since they had, at least they’d been smart enough to stop.
A few minutes later, as she crawled into her big, empty bed, she refused to let herself imagine what it might have been like to have Gabe there with her, his strong muscles pressing hers down into the mattress as he came over her.
Into her.